News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1887-12-29

the very day when he watere1 the stock, Will
find wharf rat stealing a newspaper from
the basement doorway, and Will go out and
catch the urchin by the collar, and twist the
collar so tightly the poor fellow cannot say
that it was thirst for knowledge that led him
10 the dishonest act, but grip the collar
tighter and tighter, saying: have been
looking for YOU a long while; you've stole my
paper four or five times, haven't yOu:-
YOU miserable wretch And then the old
stock gambler, with a voice they can hear
three blocks, will cry out: "Pohco, police"
That same man, the evening or the day in
which he watered his stock, viii llneel
with his family in prayers an1 thank
| God for the prosperity Of the day,
then kiss his chill irel good night with
an air which seems to say: 81 hope you
will all grow up to be as gooi as your
father" Prisons for sins insecJile in size,
bat palaces for crimes drOnedarian. No
mercy for sins animalcule in proportion, but
great leniency for mlstolon I'M luity. A
poor boy slyly take; from tue basket of a
market woman n choice p3ar-slyilg some
one else from the chOerI--a you smother
him in the horrible atmosphere of Raymond
| Street Jail or New York Tombs, while his
cousin, who has been skllful enough to steal
$4,000 from the city you will make him
candidate for the New York legislature!
There is a great deal of uneasiness and ner-
VOusnesS now among sOn9 people in or
time to have gotten unrighteoIs fortunes,
great deal of nervousness about dynamite.
righteous fortunes something more explosive
than dynamite, the earthquake of his Omnip-
otent Indignation. 1t is time that we learn
III America that sin is not eXcusable in pro-
portion as it declares large dividends and has
outr1ders in equipage. Many man Is riding
to perditOn, position ahead and lackey be-
hind. To steal one copy of a newspaper is a
gnat; to steal many thousands Of dollars is a
camel There is many fruitdealer who woul l
not consent to steal a basket of peaches from
ncghbOr's stall, but who would not scruple
to depres5 tho fruit market; and as long rs
| can remember we have read every summer
the peach crop of Maryland is failure, and
by the time the crop comes in the misappre-
heusion makes difference of millions of dol
lars. A man who would not steal one peach
basket steals 5000 peach baskets. Go down
i'll the summer time into the Mercantile
library, in the reading room, and see the
newspaper reports of the crops from all parts
of the country, and their phraseology is very
much the same and the same men wrote
them, nletho1ically and infalnously carry
ing out the huge lying about the grain crop
from year to year and for score of years.
After while there will be a corner in
the wheat market, and men who had
contempt for a petty theft Will bur
glarize the wheat bin of a nation and
commit larceny upon the American corn
crib And some of the men win sit in
churches and in reformatory institutions try
ing to strain out the small gnats of scoundrel-
ism, while in their grain elevators and their
storehouses they are fattening huge camels
which they expect after a while to swallow.
Society has to be entirely reconstructed on
this subject We are to find that sin is in
excusable in proportion as it is great.
know in our time the tendency is to charge
religious frauds upon good men. They say:
'Oh what a class of frauds you have in the
Church of God in this day. and when an
elder of a church, or deacon,o or minister Of
the Gospel, or a superintendent of Sabbath
school turns out a defaulter, what display
heads there are in many of the newspapers.
Great primer type. Five line plea. 'Another
Saint Absconded;" Clerical Scoundrel-
ISM, Religion at a Discount" "shame
on the ChurcheS;' while there are
thousand scoundrels outside to where
there is one inside the church, and
the misbehavior of those who never see
the inside of a church is so great it is enough
to tempt man to become Christian to get
out of their company. But in all circles,
religious and irreligiOus, the tendency is to
excuse SIN IN proportion as 1t Is mammoth.
Even John Milton in his Paradise Lost
while he condemns Satan, gives such grand
description of him You have hard work TO
suppress your admiration Oh, this strain
ing out of small sins like gnats and this gulp-
ing down great iniquities like camels
This subject does not give the picture of
one or two persons, but is a gallery in which
of people may see their likenesses.
For instance, ali those people who, while they
would not rob their neighbor of farthing,
appropriate the money and the treasure Of
Jle pubic n l0dD mas q mousse 10 sell, ana
he tells his customer it is worth $4,000.
Next day the assessor comes around and
the owner says it is worth $4,000 The
government of the United States took
Off the tax from personal income among
other reasons, because so few people
would tell the truth, and many a man with
an income of hundreds of dollars day made
which seemed to imply he was
about to be handed over to the overseer of
the poor. Careful to pay their passage from
Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling in
their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from
Paris and a half dozen watches from Geneva,
Switzerland, telling the Custom-house officers
on the wharf: There is nothing in that
trunk but wearing apparel - and putting a
hve-dolar gold piece in his hand to punctuate
the statement.
Described in the text are all those who are
particular never to break the law of gram
mar, and who want all their language an cle-
CANT specimen OF syutaN, straininy out all
the inaccuracies of speech with a fine sieve of
literary criticism, while through their con
eIJi2 e. s9a ,Ir I'D i,Inn9lt2 ,, }d pro
nvau OF cnmcls, w-len they might better
fracture every lIw of the language
and shock intellectual taste, and better let
every verb seek in vain for its nomlnatlVe,
and every noun for its government, ana
every proposition lose its way in the sentence,
an a1jectives and participles and pronouns
get into q grand riot worthy OF the tourth
Ward on election day, than to commit
moral inaccuracy. Better swallow thou
sand gnats than one camel
Such parsons are alSO ueSi'TlDcu III une text
who are very much alarmed about the small
faults of others, and have no alarm about
their own great trdnSgreS5iOns. There are in
every community and every church watch
dogs, who feel called upon to keep their eyes
on others and grOwl. They are full of suspi-
cions They wonder if that man IS not dis
honest; il that man is not unclean; if there is
not something wrong about the other man.
They are always the first to hear of anything
wrong VultureS are always the first to smell
p, Tbnv n re Snlf niutpI detectives. L
ay this down as rule wi thout any exception.
that those people who have the most tault
themselves are most merciless in taclr watch
ing of Others From scalp of hea to sole OF
foot they are full of iea,ousieS and hypercrlti
cisms They spend their life in hunting fol
muskrats md mud turtles, instead Of hunting
for Roclly Mount lin eagles, always for some
thing mean instead Of something grand
They look at their Eeighbors lmperiectlom
through a microscope and look at their own
imperfactons through telescope upside
down. Twenty faults of their own do not huri
them so much one fault of somebody elsa
Their neighbors' imperfections are like gnats
and they strain them out; their own imperfec
tious are like camels and they swallow them.
But lest some might think they escape the
scrutiny of the text, | have to tell you that
we all come under the divine satire when we
make the questions of time more prominent
than the questions of eternity Come now,
let us all go into the confessional Are not
all tempted to make the question: Where
shall live now? greater than the question:
Where shall hive forever: How shall l get
more dollars here! greater than the question;
How shall Ilay up treasures in heaven. the
question: How shall pay my debts to mant
greater than the question: How shall | meet
my obligations to God! the question: How
shall gain the world. greater than the ques-
ton: What if | lose my soulf the question:
Why did God let sin come into the world:
greater than the question, How shall ! get
it eXtirpated from my nature the question:
What shall do with the twenty or forty or
seventy years of my sublunar existence
greater than the question: What shall do
with the millions Of cycles of my post terres
trial existence Time, how small it is!
Eternity, how vast it isl The former more
insignificant in comSa .son with til latter
than a gnat is insignificant when compared
with a camel We lodged the text We
said: /" That doesn't mean me, and that doesn't
mean me- and with ruinous benevolence
we are giving the whole sermon away.
But let us all surrender to the charge
What an ado about things here. What poor
preparation for great eternity. As though
a minnow were larger than behemoth, as
though swallow took wider circuit than an
albatrosS, as though a nettle We're taller than
a Lebanon cedar, as though gnat were
greater than camel, as though minute
were longer than a century, as though time
were higher, deeper, broader than eternity.
So the text which flashed with lightning OF
wit as Christ uttered it, is followed by the
crashing thunders Of awful catastrophe TO
those who make the questions of time great r
than the questions of the future, the oncom-
ing, overshadowing future. O, eternity
eternity! eternity!